Prophet's Prey (14 page)
Authors: Sam Brower
Released from confidentiality by the death of his patient, the therapist finally shared Rachel's story with ex-FLDS family members and friends outside of the church, who told it to me. The cause of Rachel's troubles, according to the therapist, was that she had been sexually molested as a child by her father Rulon and by her brother Warren Jeffs. As Rulon's confidant, Ron Rohbock apparently knew this and kept the abuse she suffered quiet. Connecting the dots, it all made sense. Warren would later admit to having immoral relations with a sister and daughter. He used Rohbock to demonstrate in the harshest terms that he practiced neither mercy nor forgiveness, even when it came to his most loyal followers. And any protest would only prove that God had discovered his black heart.
Later during my investigation, in the summer of 2005, I worked through a contact to set up a possible meeting with Rohbock. Knowing his background, I was not optimistic, but I had to try. He had the potential to be a very valuable source of information. A deal was arranged: We would go to a restaurant, where I would sit on one side while Ron and my contact sat at a table on the other side. If Ron was comfortable with the idea of talking, the contact would wave me over. But the wave never came, and I never made personal contact. Even after being ruined by the FLDS, he could not summon up the courage to speak out against the prophet and the church.
The stress of all the negative attention, the sudden awakening of government law enforcement, the relentless threat posed by his enemies, and the requirements of running the entire FLDS all by himself overwhelmed the prophet. Danger lurked everywhere. He expected to be arrested or assassinated, and he routinely prayed for “fire from heaven ⦠to keep all evil powers and spirits away.”
“No one knows how many times you have been through this mortality,” his stepmother-wife-scribe Naomi cooed sweetly to comfort him after watching him twist and turn in his bed all night, burning within rings of fire. “You were foreordained to come back to earth at this time ⦠You are a God.”
She always knew what to say, but this time soft words of praise were not enough. He needed a way out from under his mounting problems. Warren was flying blind, relying on an instinct for survival. “I ain't got all the answers, 'cause I ain't been asked all the questions. So don't demand all the answers right now, because all the changes ain't takin' place yet,” he told his scribe. “I am taking it as it comes.”
He thought discord was spreading within the FLDS, and had even wormed its way into his own household. Jealousy was breaking out as earlier wives were forced to make room for the new ones, and one even had the audacity to become upset when she discovered him groping and kissing a new wife. None of this slowed down his acquisition of young girls. In a single eight-day span, he zoomed from twenty-five to forty-two new victims in his stable, with still more undergoing religious “trainings” before being officially corralled. At least one was given a double wedding ring to prove she was married to both Rulon and Warren.
Troubles mounted throughout 2003. Legal actions were being filed, less than half of the original congregation in Canada remained, and the law in Arizona and Utah, according to Warren, was telling “terrible lies against [him].” He likened the accusations to a Mafia novel because authorities gave their sources pseudonyms to protect their identities, even as Warren himself became more and more like the Mafia dons he professed to abhor. He hauled along a full security detail when he shared breakfast with ninety women and children in Cottonwood Park.
It was becoming too much for him to handle, and he decided on a unique solution: simply to disappear. “The Lord has directed me to move away,” Warren confided to some wives after a revelation. Scouts were dispatched to seek isolated locations across the nation in which he and those loyal to him could find shelter when the world finally came to an end. In reality, they would be a series of emergency bolt-holes in which he could hide from the law.
A place in heavy forest about twenty miles outside the little town of Mancos, in southwestern Colorado, was the first selected, and the first of several parcels of land there had been purchased on July 11, 2003, through an FLDS shell corporation called Sherwood Management, under the guise of being a corporate hunting retreat. The mountainous and thickly wooded terrain reminded Warren of the grand family estate that had been abandoned in Little Cottonwood Canyon when they had all moved to Short Creek. Mancos was given the code name of Refuge One, or R-1, to avoid disclosing its location. Specially chosen work crews were dispatched to start building there in great secrecy, and orders were placed for truckloads of Canadian logs from the FLDS colony up north that would be turned into cabins. The hideout was to be in operation by the last day of November, a tight deadline that Warren promised could be met because angels would work alongside crews, even when they were only putting up sheetrock.
After a good deal of work had been put into the Mancos project, another even more attractive possibility was found down in West Texas, a state that was very light on zoning and building restrictions. Texans tended to mind their own business, and the state's marriage laws had not changed since the nineteenth century; girls as young as fourteen could still legally be married there with the consent of their parents. It looked very promising, and FLDS front man David Allred was authorized to buy 1,371 acres of rural land outside of the town of Eldorado, in Schleicher County. Several hundred more acres would be purchased later. “Thanks unto the Lord for His bounteous blessings in acquiring the land in Texas,” Jeffs sang out with great joy on Sunday, November 23.
This presented a whole new set of problems: how to get construction under way in Texas even as the R-1 refuge in Mancos was still incomplete. Warren set unrealistic deadlines, saying it was a “life and death” matter to finish the houses in Colorado by November 30, so that he could send four men down to Texas to begin foundation work there. He said the workmen should not be concerned about the breakneck schedule because “attending angels” would be helping them pound the nails and put up sheetrock.
When they were not actually building in Mancos, the chosen workmen underwent intensive new spiritual training for their sacred new calling at the Texas site that Warren was calling both “R-17” and “Zion.” They were already loyal FLDS members and skilled workers, but now they had to be elevated to the exalted rank of “temple builders,” a title never before heard within the FLDS that carried great prestige as well as secrecy.
With his master escape plan coming together, the time had come to slam the hammer down on his Short Creek enemies. Warren would later report that God delivered specific instructions on what had to be done during a special revelation on December 24, the night before Christmas 2003. When he returned from Texas, he would follow those instructions and take care of one last important piece of business in Short Creek.
CHAPTER 18
Warren Jeffs blew into Texas on a lie. A single entity buying more than thirteen hundred acres of land at once was bound to draw attention, even in rural areas of Texas. A curious neighbor who watched the new activity while leaning on the fence at the eastern boundary was told that a private hunting lodge for rich men was to be built on the ranch and that construction workers and their families were coming in to get things under way.
The first time that Warren went walking alone on the Texas property, on Sunday afternoon, January 4, 2004, he followed a dirt track to the northeast and got lost in the sprawling, empty sameness of it all. He wandered back south and was gone for two hours, until found by an FLDS man driving a dump truck. The next day, undertaking a wider exploration with a guide, he bounced along aboard a small and rugged four-wheeler and got a better lay of the land. Zion blazed in full glory in his churning imagination, as he charted out where God wanted the temple to be built, as well as the houses, the barn, the dairy, and the manufacturing and agricultural areas. He saw deer and antelope and got the worst case of hay fever he had ever had.
But he could not linger. Claiming to have an important Saturday Work Meeting to conduct back in Short Creek, he headed back to Mancos, Colorado, leaving behind his hand-picked cadre of twenty-five men, twelve women, and sixteen children to start the Texas project. They would live for now bunched into a large camper trailer, a motor home, and four tents. The motor home had a bathroom and the tent dwellers shared a portable toilet. The living conditions were really much too Spartan for a man of Warren's delicate sensibilities.
An eerie scene unfolded shortly after dawn on January 10, 2004, at the cavernous LeRoy S. Johnson Meeting House in Short Creek. The tall, slender Prophet Warren Jeffs had arrived in the empty hall at 6:40 A.M. and was standing alone at the speaker's platform when the FLDS faithful began to show up. He was not smiling. God had finally identified his enemies and shown how they were to be handled. On this day, Warren would prove to the FLDS, once and for all, that it was he who held the reins of power in their lives.
As usual, it was an FLDS members-only affair. But over time, and through many interviews, listening to tape recordings of Warren's monotone tirade, and finally reading his own version of events in the Priesthood Record, I was able to piece together exactly what happened that morning, and the hazy initial reports smoothed into crystal clarity. Warren manhandled them.
Dan Barlow, the town's mayor and fire chief, was one of the early arrivals at the meeting house, and he approached Jeffs and shook his hand. The prophet edged Barlow to the side and quietly confided that he had been instructed by the Lord to deliver a public correction to Barlow; the mayor could either stay in the audience or listen in private from an adjoining room. Barlow chose to stay. A number of other men received similar quiet, personal warnings as they arrived with their families, and they also chose to remain in the big central chamber.
The women and girls were as usual dressed modestly in long, pastel-colored prairie dresses, and their long hair was swept up in the unique fashion that is standard within the religion, but that outsiders call a “plyg-do.” The men and boys wore their long-sleeved shirts buttoned at the wrists and collar, for any display of skin would be frowned upon. The children were well-behaved and squeaky clean.
Jeffs conducted the service with authority, reading forcefully from church doctrine that men who would spread even the least doubt among the faithful must be cast out. For an hour and a half, he flailed them in a voice that carried no more inflection than the drone of an air conditioner. One by one, he expelled seventeen men, dropping his ax on many whose families had carved the town out of the wilderness before Warren was even born. He commanded everyone to rise.
“The Lord has revealed to me that these men no longer hold Priesthood. They have been tested of God and found wanting and Heavenly Father, through the Prophet, will have me handle these men in order to begin a cleaning up of his kingdom before the great and dreadful day of the Lord. We love these brethren and await the day that we can welcome them back into the brotherhood of the Lord but until they have been sufficiently humbled before God and bow before the Lord with a broken heart and contrite spirit, the Lord God will have me send them away to repent from a distance!”
There was a pause as the congregation seemed to be holding its breath as they soaked up the startling decision. Warren pushed ahead.
“All those who can validate this action as the will and word of God, please so manifest by raising your arm to the square. Any in opposition may so manifest in the same manner.” Of course, there were no dissenting votes. All in attendance raised their hand in support of the prophet. Even the surprised victims reacted with reflexive obedience and raised their right hands as if swearing in court, to affirm the decree. He then dismissed the exiled men from the meeting, with instructions to return to their homes and prepare to leave Short Creek as soon as possible. They accepted the abuse like meek little lambs.
Among those Warren expelled were four of his own brothers: David (who was confined to a wheelchair due to polio), Hyrum, Brian, and Blaine. In the complicated Jeffs family tree, Blaine's youngest wife was also his stepdaughter.
(As strange as it seems, that is not an uncommon practice within the FLDS. When a man is thrown out of the church, the prophet automatically dissolves all of the transgressor's previous marriages. The freed wives and children are assigned by the prophet to someone else, so new kids are frequently being brought into established families. The prophet may later reward the new father for displaying great obedience in taking on the responsibility of someone else's family by assigning one of the new stepdaughters to be another wife. The girl thus becomes a sister-wife of her own mother and is available for sex with the man who is her new father.)
Of paramount importance for Warren on that momentous January day of reckoning was the opportunity to “handle” four of the influential Barlow brothers. The family responsible for the unauthorized monument, library, and museum was decimated. Mayor Dan Barlow was on the list. So were prominent businessman Nephi Barlow and Truman Barlow, an important figure financially within the church and in town tax collections and disbursements. The primary target was Louis Barlow, age eighty, who many people had thought should have become the prophet instead of Warren with the death of Rulon in 2002.
Warren accused the Barlows of forgetting God by having erected monuments to man in Short Creekâconstituting idolatryâand charged that they had secretly been forming “a counterfeit government.” They were ordered to write letters of confession, leave their homes and families, and to “not come in this community until they receive permission from me, of the Lord.” It was the standard sentence for men and boys who were thrown out of the religion: Repent from afar.
He was not yet finished, and he now instructed the entire congregation of several thousand people to kneel before him. “I raised my arm to the square and pled with the Lord to forgive these people,” he would recall later in his record of events. Then he addressed the families of the banished. “All you ladies married to these men are released from them and will remove yourselves immediately from their presence. If you don't, I will have to let you go.”
Four more men also would be tossed out soon after that fateful meeting, bringing the total expulsions to twenty-one. They were stunned. Nothing had ever happened on such a scale in Short Creek; with so many FLDS families being destroyed in one swoop, hundreds of women and children were affected.
The dumbfounded congregation was instructed to begin a two-day fast as part of the repentance process. After a closing prayer, Warren brought the extraordinary gathering to a close and calmly strolled to the exit doors to shake hands with the congregants as they filed past. Happy to have dodged the bullet themselves, they eagerly declared their loyalty.
“I love you all,” Warren assured them, projecting an image of unwavering loveâ“keeping sweet”âwhile having casually destroyed so many lives. The awful repercussions of that day can be measured in the suicide, death, despair, depression, misery, financial ruin, incest, and immorality that followed. The wives of the expelled men would be “reassigned” to other men, and their children would be forced to call a stranger “Father.”
It was all done in the name of the Lord.
The political rivalry between the Jeffs family and the Barlows stretched back a long time, but the power struggle was now over. Warren believed that he had ended it by ripping the heart out of the Barlow clan, but he would continue to cut them even deeper in the months to come, vindictive in his retribution. There was no mercy because the people needed to understand what happens to those who dared to challenge the Lord's self-anointed leader.
The Barlows and the other expelled men did not recognize just how serious Warren was about crushing them. They thought their exiles would be temporary, and that after repenting for a couple of weeks, they would be allowed to return to their homes and regain their families. That was not the prophet's plan at all, and as time passed, my investigation would show that some of the women and children were handed around the “priesthood” like sugar candy at a party; everybody got a turn.
When the expelled Barlow men moved into a house together in another town, Warren attacked again, ruling that if they were ever to regain even the slightest chance of being forgiven by him, they could not keep each other company. If they were together, they might be tempted to commiserate about how they had been wronged and start plotting against the prophet. Once again, they blindly followed Warren's edict, obeyed his absurd rules, and separated to live alone, with no family contact whatsoever.
The unrelenting pressure, loneliness, and humiliation eventually became too much for the elderly Louis Barlow. Once considered a candidate to lead the entire religion, he now slid into depression and debt, living off his credit cards. The old man decided that no matter what had been decreed, perhaps God might accept him into Heaven after all, so he took his own life. Suffering from congestive heart failure, Louis stopped taking his medications and died of a heart attack in May, four months after having been excommunicated.
Warren even seized that tragedy to further shame his deceased rival and the Barlow clan. He magnanimously allowed a funeral to be conducted at the meeting house and a burial in the town cemetery, but he would not allow the grave to be dedicated, a traditional and vital part of an FLDS funeral service. Jeffs claimed that Louis had not fully repented before death, so was undeserving of his priesthood blessing. At the service, the dead man's former wives were ordered to sit beside their newly assigned husbands.
There was no longer any confusion about who was in charge of the FLDS and the millions of dollars of riches in its financial arm, the United Effort Plan.
Immediately after the Saturday Work Meeting on January 10, Warren Jeffs disappeared.
Only eleven hours and fifty minutes after delivering his blow to Short Creek, he was back in the Mancos hideout, rushing to lead the church hierarchy into what he called “deep hiding.” Elderly Uncle Fred had been quietly removed to Mancos in the middle of the night, stripped of his title as the bishop of Short Creek, and Warren instructed Fred's wives that the old man was “gone, not to come back” to the town. Wendell Nielsen, the old ally who had filled Warren's slot as first counselor in the presidency, would also go underground with Warren and Fred, surfacing only for special missions. Jeffs ordered his own family to scatter, and they piled into waiting vehicles and took off, destinations unknown, some joining him five hours later in Colorado.
The only newspaper in Short Creek is an irregularly published community periodical from the church, but bigger papers had been watching and had developed sources in the town. The
Daily Spectrum
in nearby St. George and the
Deseret News
and
Salt Lake Tribune
in Salt Lake City all carried stories on the meeting in their Sunday editions on January 11. Anxious police throughout the area responded with calls to Chief Marshal Sam Roundy to offer assistance in case there was a riot. Warren sniffed at such intrusive attention by the media and the law, since he considered the political massacre to be just an internal “setting in order of the people.” He had dealt with the master deceivers and everything would now be able to return to normal.
That was not to be, for an insignificant Short Creek resident named Ross Chatwin had stormed into the mix. Chatwin had already been expelled for trying to take a second wife without permission, but Warren now learned that Chatwin, instead of being obedient, was fighting back. He had sent out hundreds of letters claiming that Louis Barlow was the rightful prophet of the FLDS. This brand-new enemy had come out of nowhere, and on January 14, the impertinent man held a news conference in which he denounced Warren as a tyrant. Short Creek was invaded by the gentilesâcops and the mediaâand all of Warren's hard work to put things in order there seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
Warren told his scribe, “We have no friends on earth.” He canceled a plan to return to Short Creek, using the excuse that people were waiting there to kill him. Instead, he would take a road trip.
Despite the heightened tension, some needs remained constant, according to his Record, and Warren snatched two more children as brides: Gloria Ann Steed and Veda Keate, both only thirteen years old. They were happily given to Warren by their fathers and mothers. And as the storm broke, he married two moreâLoretta Jane Barlow, also thirteen, and Permelia Johnson, fifteen. In his own words in the Priesthood Record, Jeffs admitted to marrying four underage girls within a few days. He simply took them. No little girl in the faith was safe if the prophet wanted her.